SEO Case Study: How SEOJet Resurrected A Dying Exact Match Domain

Staying on top in the SEO world requires constant monitoring and tweaking. In many cases, you’ll have to take a 180-degree turn from a strategy that had previously been effective.

One thing you should always do is follow the data. That’s exactly what SEOJet can help you do, quickly and easily.

A company specializing in the HCG Diet started using SEOJet a few years ago. HCGDiet.com used our service as a last-ditch effort to resurrect what had once been a powerful exact match domain.

At one point, HCGDiet.com was ranking #1 for the keyphrase “hcg diet.” Those rankings started dropping after a Google update and it was clear something had to be done.

Even with such a powerful name, the site had dropped to the bottom of Google’s first page for their exact match domain and even some of their affiliates were ranking higher than they were.

Homepage SEO Strategy

HCGDiet.com had built over 900 backlinks to their homepage and far too many of those links contained keyphrases in the anchor text.

Cleaning up their homepage backlink profile was a top priority. SEOJet helps customers do this by analyzing the top ranking sites for a specific keyphrase and then creating a link map showing what percentage of different anchor texts to use to get there.

When HCGDiet.com entered all of their homepage links into SEOJet they quickly realized how far off they were from what their homepage should look like. They needed to decrease the number of links with keyphrases in the anchor text (0%) and add anchor texts that were branded, natural, or URLs (67%).

So the process was simple, follow the homepage link map and start fixing the keyphrase-heavy anchor text profile.

Up until that point, HCGDiet.com had a link-building budget of $500-1,000 per month. The company would need more links to complete SEOJet’s link map, but they were cautious about adding too many links so quickly. That would certainly raise red flags at Google.

They hadn’t been link-building at all for over a year and a big jump in links seemed too risky.

HCGDiet.com took new link-building slow at first. The majority of their focus was building links to the homepage, but they also built a few to some long-form content pieces they had on the site.

After a month or two of building links this way, they ramped up the budget to $2,000-3,500 per month and started hitting their pages hard with quality links.

Inner Page SEO Strategy

If you’ve read any of our blog posts you know how much we preach brand building on the homepage and then building SEO power pages to target keyphrases.

A power page is a piece of long-form content that acts as a hub for high-performing keywords, keyphrases, and backlinks. They can seriously beef up your rankings if done right. We have other blogs explaining how to set up a power page on your site.

The next step in the SEO strategy for HCGDiet.com (while they were fixing the homepage link profile) was to build out 4 or 5 power pages that they could also build links for to help make their site an entrenched authority on the HCG Diet.

Besides generating authority and web traffic, the power pages could also be used for some of the new links they needed to make.

They still built new links to the homepage, but a consistent number of links were also hitting the power pages. HCDiet.com would also limit how many anchor texts were exact match domain.

One power page, for example, was a post listing over 150 HCG Diet recipes.

They chose this page because it was a big piece of content with no backlink profile. The idea was to start fresh. It would also become popular among visitors in no time.

They submitted the recipes power page into SEOJet and simply followed the link map below.

After acquiring about 5 or 6 primary links and a few tiered links, the recipes page ranked in the top 3 for “hcg diet recipes.”

It was now obvious they were on the right track, so they continued to build relevant guest post links. So what happened next?

HCGDiet.com’s homepage started ranking in the Top 3 again for the keyphrase “hcg diet” and it only took 20 primary links to get there. The SEOJet tool is so precise it often helps websites to rank at the top of Google using only a fraction of the links built by their competitors.

Check out the backlink profile for the homepage after they started using SEOJet:

Revenue Is The True Measuring Stick

Rankings are nice and all, but what matters is revenue. How much money did the company make after using SEOJet? Here is a snapshot of their revenue analytics for ten months:

HCGDiet.com started using SEOJet in January but, in all fairness, January is a huge month for the diet industry with New Year’s resolutions. But, you can see the sustained and continued growth as their rankings climbed in Google.

One interesting thing to note was that HCGDiet.com avoided using “hcg diet” as the anchor text on their homepage because it’s an exact match domain.

That keyphrase could technically be considered a brand name but, instead, they chose to use “HCGDiet.com” for many of their new links that asked for a branded anchor text.

Without revealing any actual revenue numbers, you can see from the graph above (yes this was the actual graph from their analytics software) that their revenue has made significant gains.